"While radical militant librarians
kick us around, true terrorists benefit from Office of Intelligence Policy and
Review's failure to let us use the tools given to us"

Washington - Some agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been frustrated by what they see as the Justice Department's reluctance to let them demand records and to use other far-ranging investigative measures in terrorism cases, newly disclosed e-mail messages and internal documents show.

Publicly, the debate over the law known as the USA Patriot Act has focused on concerns from civil rights advocates that the F.B.I. has gained too much power to use expanded investigative tools to go on what could amount to fishing expeditions.

But the newly disclosed e-mail messages offer a competing view, showing that, privately, some F.B.I. agents have felt hamstrung by their inability to get approval for using new powers under the Patriot Act, which was passed weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

One internal F.B.I. message, sent in October 2003, criticized the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Justice Department, which reviews and approves terrorist warrants, as regularly blocking requests from the F.B.I. to use a section of the antiterrorism law that gave the bureau broader authority to demand records from institutions like banks, Internet providers and libraries.

"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit
from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools given to us," read the e-mail
message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. "This should
be an OIPR priority!!!"

Congress is expected to vote early next week on a final plan for reauthorizing virtually all main parts of the law, including the F.B.I.'s broader power to demand records. President Bush, who has made renewal of the measure one of his top priorities, pushed again Saturday for Congress to act quickly.

"Since its passage after the attacks of September the 11, 2001, the Patriot Act has proved essential to fighting the war on terror and preventing our enemies from striking America again," Mr. Bush said in his radio address on Saturday.

While some Republicans and Democrats have attacked a brokered agreement reached Thursday because they said it does not go far enough in protecting civil liberties, the president hailed the agreement.

"Now Congress needs to finish the job," he said. "Both the Senate
and the House need to hold a prompt vote, and send me a bill renewing the Patriot Act so I can sign it into law."

As part of the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a federal court has ordered the F.B.I. to turn over 1,500 pages of material
to the privacy information group every two weeks. [read on...]

The rapid rise of the blog phenomenon has dramatically influenced
politics over the past few years, and now blogs are changing how the
art world communicates. Interactive sites, which are devoted to
contemporary art and offer news, reviews, gossip, and links, have made
art openings as easy to follow as the stock market. The freedom of the
blog format also allows "citizen critics" to weave social commentary
and personal anecdotes with spontaneous photographs, videos, and
relevant links.

In New York, some art journalists have left print to become prominent bloggers. Tom Moody's site is chock-full of photos, artwork, and funny commentary about new media art. James Wagner, who runs ArtCal with his partner and fellow art-blogger Barry Hoggard, defines his own mix of politics and art criticism on jameswagner.com. Overseen by the artist Joy Garnett, NEWSgrist melds art and activism for the digerati. John Perreault's Artopia is notable for its un-bloglike reviews — long, thorough, and full of entertaining tangents.

In LA, art.blogging.la
provides a miscellany of West Coast commentary and traveling reports
from fairs and blockbuster shows. San Francisco's hybrid ezine/blog Fecal Face hits readers with loads of video and an inexhaustible link list. The prolific and peripatetic Tyler Green writes Modern Art Notes from DC but files reports from across the country and often dialogues with other blogs, such as Iconoduel, out of Chicago. Down south, Miami-based newcomer the Next Few Hours offers a local perspective on the city's burgeoning art scene, and collector Erik Schneider covers notable museums and galleries in Atlanta.

Although this form of instant criticism is still very much an American
phenomenon, the blognosis for international art blogs is good. You can
catch different accents on the Sydney-based site the Art Life and Diary of an Art Pimp, out of Melbourne, as well as the UK's Londonist, Things magazine's blog, and Art in Liverpool, the last of which showcases events and opportunities from this future cultural capital. Meanwhile, Artforum's Scene & Herd has become the must-read gossip column of high-profile international shows. (JK)

Artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) created drawings of the financial, political, and personal networks involved in late-20th-century international scandals, using lines, circles, and arches to capture the complexity of the corporate, financial, and political entanglements that characterize the present era. This detail illustrates the fortunes of George W. Bush's first oil company, Arbusto Energy, Inc. (arbusto is Spanish for "bush"), Spectrum 7 Energy, which purchased it, and Harken Energy, which acquired Spectrum 7 and rewarded Bush $2.25 million worth of stock and membership on its board. George W. Bush sold 212,140 shares of Harken Energy on June 22, 1990. Two weeks later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The sale was not recorded by the Securities and Exchange Commission until March of 1991, after the first Gulf War had ended. Bill Maurer's article in this issue suggests that we should hold back our enjoyment of such mappings. Representing corporate connections through an apparently complex aesthetic still leaves in place the same idealist fantasies structuring both capitalism and its critiques. He argues for a closer examination of our own ethical stance in relation to a realm of capitalist practice that, like anthropology, lies outside pure calculation.

Yahoo is on a Web 2.0 buying spree. Having already acquired Flickr, my favorite photo-sharing website, earlier this year, just this past weekend they announced the purchase of Del.icio.us, my favorite social bookmarking site, and they revealed their plans to distribute Movable Type, my favorite blogging tool.

Yahoo! has agreed to provide Movable
Type as the default blogging solution in its extensive small-business suite of services. The other hand will get washed
as parent company Six Apart directs small-business traffic to Yahoo! for a complete ISP/merchant/blogging package.
There’s nothing new about Web-hosting accounts with Movable Type pre-installed; the Movable Type site has a
recommendation page for such services, to which Yahoo! has not
been added.

Of course, Yahoo! provides a
newbie-friendly blogging experience with Yahoo! 360, which could possibly be interpreted as competition to the much
more established (and feature-rich) Blogger. But Six Apart’s three platform levels (Movable Type, TypePad, and Live
Journal) cover all the bases and could vault Yahoo! into a whole new position in the blogging wars.